Can Latest ‘Trials’ Games Convince Mobile Players to Pay?

“Trials Frontier” is a new installment in the long-running series of games from RedLynx.

RedLynx

In the fall of 1993, the Wu-Tang Clan released their debut studio album, Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). That album was littered with the critically and commercially successful tracks that would cement its legacy as one of the enduring triumphs of hip-hop; its most famous offering—“Cash Rules Everything Around Me (C.R.E.A.M.)”—taught a lasting lesson: “Cash rules everything around me/Get the money, dolla dolla bill, y’all”.

These days, it seems monetization is on everyone’s lips. The Internet has radically shifted consumer expectations—we expect content to be free, but someone, somewhere, sometime has to pay for it.

With the rise of smart devices and the democratization of programming tools, there’s been a concurrent blossoming of creativity in the dominant digital medium: the app ecosystem. Mobile gaming in particular has had to renegotiate its relationship with its consumers.

Now that fully 56% of Americans have a smartphone, mobile games have seen a meteoric increase in popularity—and, to be sure, it’s been a while since phone games were blocky 8-bit with chiptune melodies. When was the last time you played Candy Crush Saga?

Solving the monetization dilemma is one of the main challenges facing game studios today. One answer, in-game microtransactions, generates revenue via—as the name implies—small payments for special items, powerups, costumes, and the like. Gamers, by and large, hate it.

The first incarnation of the Trials series of video games began life as a JavaScript game, released for free by RedLynx to the entire Internet in 2000. 14 years hence, the series has made the jump to consoles (with 2009’s critically acclaimed Trials HD), and now, finally, has been remade for its next-gen console debut, Trials Fusion. (RedLynx has also released Trials Frontier, a companion iOS game that’s designed to work with Fusion).

All the Trials titles revolve around the same beautifully simple mechanic: you guide a nameless rider on a motorbike through increasingly treacherous landscapes. The game simplifies things further by rendering the tracks in 2D, restricting the bike’s movement to a single plane. Naturally, this does not make completing the levels any easier.

Trials has been around for over a decade, and the games have found a loyal fanbase in both players and critics: the storms of opinion that generally batter long-running franchises have mostly avoided RedLynx’s shores. Frontier and Fusion, though, might change that. Where the previous two titles mostly eschewed macro- and microtransactions in the form of supplementary downloadable content (DLC), Frontier and Fusion make those extras more central to their gameplay.

In Trials Frontier, the free-to-play iOS title, microtransactions creep in slowly but surely—at first, you can buy in-game currency and pay to instantly complete bike upgrades; later, you’re able to use real cash to buy more spins in a game lottery, earning the ability to unlock hidden items and secret tracks.

The most obvious benefit of Frontier’s microtransactions is the ability to pay for a full fuel tank—fuel, of course, being the limiting factor on how much you can play at a time, as it costs a certain number of units to race a track and the gauge refills slowly, in real time. When I started playing the game, I gave myself a hard and fast rule that I wouldn’t spend any money on in-game purchases; after the sixth or seventh time I ran up against the fuel limit, I’d clicked through to the in-game store before I realized what I was doing.

Trials Fusion (released on April 16th for PS4, Xbox One, and Xbox 360) operates on the other dominant in-game transaction model, the season pass. Essentially, purchasing a season pass—which, for Fusion, is equal to the cost of the game itself—guarantees access to all (or a specific piece) of a game’s downloadable content, as opposed to buying singular content offerings. It’s the same principle that underlies buying candy in bulk at Costco instead of making an impulse purchase in the line at the grocery store; good if you know you’re going to eat a lot of candy, but not so great if you’re not big on the sweet stuff.

All of this said, neither Frontier nor Fusion departs much from the original Trials formula, and that’s a very good thing. Fusion’s tracks are displayed in gorgeous high-def, and the races are richer than ever, with a number of Easter eggs in every level (many involving penguins?), Portal-tinged whimsy, and a powerfully engaged community. Frontier has a vague storyline—one member of a desert collective has gone rogue and stolen everything important, only you can stop him!—but the gameplay is otherwise satisfyingly immersive; the Trials format feels at home on iOS.

With Fusion and Frontier, it’s clear that RedLynx has taken the next step in their evolution as a company: they’ve created an impressively polished platform to build upon over the next few years. I found Fusion a remarkably self-assured game, one that felt solid in the same way that the Halo games did—serious in its playfulness, sure, but a game with a sturdy core. While I wasn’t a fan of Frontier’s aggressive integration of microtransactions—similar in scope to the aforementioned Candy Crush Saga—as I felt it interfered with the experience, I do understand the motivation behind the decision.

At their hearts, Fusion and Frontier are something of a bellwether for the gaming industry. RedLynx has nearly everything a studio could wish for—a raft of critically acclaimed games, a highly involved community, a larger gaming public than ever, and the accumulated wisdom of nearly 15 years of experience. If they can’t convince gamers to buy into in-game transactions, who can? Dolla dolla bills, y’all, indeed.